According to the ethic of life, all living organisms are of special moral importance. Living things, unlike simple artifacts or biological collectives, are not mere things whose value is entirely instrumental. This book articulates why the ethic is immune to most of the standard criticisms raised against it, but also why such an ethic is untenable, why the domain of moral concern does not extend to all living things; it argues for an old conclusion in an entirely new way. To see why the ethic must be abandoned requires that we look carefully at the foundations of the ethic—the ways in which it is tightly connected to issues in the philosophy of biology and the sorts of assumptions it must draw on to distinguish the living from the nonliving. This book draws on resources from a variety of branches of philosophy and the sciences to show that the ethic cannot survive this scrutiny, and it articulates what the death of the ethic of life means in a variety of areas of practical concern, including environmental ethics, biomedical ethics, ethics of technology, and in philosophy more generally.
Do microbes question standard thinking in the philosophy of biology?
